Designing the sfRESTClientPlugin: Sketching a Client API for RESTful Interactions
I’ve lately been exploring the value proposition of RESTful APIs to organizations whose technological infrastructures are built upon a collection of legacy software components, customized to communicate with each other by highly tailored middleware software stacks.
That exploration will not unfold in this post, however. It could easily be an entire book unto itself.
Rather, I would like to focus specifically on ideas I’ve had about what a high level object oriented API for interacting with RESTful services might look like, and funnel those thoughts into the design and implementation of a plugin I’m developing for the Symfony framework, called sfRESTClientPlugin.
Audience and Scope
This post assumes at least casual familiarity with Web development. I will explore some general principles of the RESTful interaction paradigm, but only to the extent to which they inform the design direction of the plugin’s API.
Although all the code samples will be in PHP, it is my hope that the exercise will yield material valuable to people working with other software stacks.
